Whitney McDonald 0:09
Hello, and welcome to the buzz of bank automation news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald, and I’m the deputy editor of bank automation news. I’m joined by Shane Closser, head of industry of financial services at Yext, which is a digital experience software provider, he discussed how banks can enhance customer experience through search, and how this trend will impact the financial industry throughout q4 and into 2023. Solely. So, you know, what we’ve really seen with COVID is it’s accelerated everybody’s digital plans. That usually was like a three year plan, pretty much happened in three to six months,Shane Closser 0:45
we’ve seen customers behavior change. So they have different expectations, a lot of those came from these consumer expectations where they’re engaged in everyday consumerism,we think of Amazon, Amazon and Google, the kind of some of those big trends is what you were alluding to is obviously this touchless experience, you know, they now expect more choice when within their financial services, relationships, that includes being able to transact, sign up for Bill Pay, make a lot of these transactions that previously were required to go into the bank with the physical experience, there was a lot of requirements for, for instance, when I was signing up for a mortgage to sign a lot of paperwork, and you know, do a close on that, and then I’ll move to the closing. And, you know, the ability to be able to kind of select how they want to engage, whether that is you know, online baking, not talking to a financial professional or something like that, you know, Zoom format, where they can sign up video conferences and engage with, say, financial advisor, talking about what’s going on in the market, where they should put their money kind of risk appetite they have.

Whitney McDonald 1:58
Now, of course, we know that clients want this digital experience. So how can banks keep up with this trend of implementing the right digital processes that clients are expecting now?

Shane Closser 2:13
So I think, first of all, it’s the website used to be the center of the world for their digital strategy. And, you know, a lot of our clients used to kind of exclusively focus on redesigning their website, maybe there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions that have certainly happened over the last two years, you know, different capabilities that they’re now providing. So we think, even simple capabilities, like are you open right now? What are your hours of operation? Do you have, you know, a drive up ATM, you know, quick check deposits for the features that exists. And so, a lot of times these banks, were just starting out with some of the trying to keep up with some of the basic information. But it was hard enough to keep this information up to date on their website. And then we start to imagine Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon, Alexa Voice networks. So there’s literally hundreds of places that they’re trying to keep up with all this information about branches and all of the financial professionals they had. And they were really struggling with that. And COVID, kind of push them over the wall, right over your Cliff a little bit around this, because those experiences became absolutely quintessential for reaching out to the community, and there’s a lot of things that were happening. One of them was retail experiences, or this small, medium business experiences, like the PPP loans that were happening, where, you know, a lot of these digital experiences had never had that kind of scale adoption before. And we saw it in a lot of the news where there were things crashing like call center queue times were like two hours. And then a lot of times they you know, crashed and then eventually, at a certain point, and they didn’t have enough people to be able to staff call centers. And so there was a lot of problems that were exposed. And some obviously financial services organizations were really caught flat footed, flat footed around this. So when he one of the things that we’ve seen is, there’s been a lot of algorithm changes specifically with Google. So you can think about 80% of consumers are using search to go to a lot of these branch websites. And one of those algorithm updates is with the city and the other one is called to helpful update. And ultimately what you know, what their focus has been is how do they how do they bring relevant content to consumers that consumers care about? And some of the best practices that organizations can think about to make sure that their content is discoverable is reviews so reviews and reputation management? It has become a very critical topic in the industry. For instance, Wealth Management previously, because of the testimonial rule was not allowed to engage in reviews that changed November 4. So that’s just, you know, few weeks ago. And so that’s a really new precedents in the industry. There are some regulatory names that you have to adhere to. But retail banking, insurance, mortgage, all these other industries have been leveraging reviews. And we’ve seen that having those four or five star reviews can improve your search ranking by 45%. We also see that it so it’s an important trust signal for algorithms just like what we’d like to say. But we’ve also seen at the same time, those four or five star reviews, you get a 16% improvement in calls, as well as an 18% improvement in clicks to your website. So it’s important trust signal for consumers to so things to think about is how financial services organizations can really start to understand that and leverage his reputation. Management is trusting roles and authority in the market for their branches for their ATMs for their financial professionals and for their products, so that they can make sure that they’re obviously creating, reducing as much friction as possible for consumers being able to interact with them.

Whitney McDonald 6:33
Now, if we can talk a little bit about where Yext fits into this equation of allowing banks to keep up with the client expectation on the digital side, maybe explain a little bit of Yext offerings, and then what banks can do to leverage those offerings.

Shane Closser 6:48
Yeah, be glad to. So we provide what’s called the answers platform, and there’s a few things that we do. I’ll talk about them as use cases. So number one, how to, you know, financial services and banks allow all their information to be updated. So we think of when they go to Google and they search for Is there a bank near me, or what are the hours of operation, or I’d like to talk to a mortgage loan officer that speaks Spanish. So that information, you know, a lot of times it’s on their website, but they really struggled to go to those 200 Plus places to make sure all that information is updated. So that’s one thing that Yaks helps with, you can go in yaks, we have all the regulatory approvals. That information goes through workflow. So the people that need to kind of sign off on that can and then that is distributed out to all these 250 places that we mean, maintain relationships with so we have API’s in the Google, Facebook, Microsoft Bing. So that’s kind of one use case. The second use case is reviews. And it become extremely important to be able to monitor those reviews what people are saying, to be able to ask for reviews and to be able to respond to those reviews. So we’ve seen that right now, first of all, from a search engine perspective, people with four or five star reviews have a 45% improvement in search. And, you know, a lot of times, by asking for those reviews, you can increase your review rating by 1.1 star. So we provide a lot of those, like capabilities to manage that at scale. Not only about kind of branch, but also ATMs, financial professionals products and you know quite a bit other. So the third thing that we’re doing is what we call pages. And so we think of all these digital experiences that are in mobile apps that are online, to be able to kind of power that digital front door. So like we like to say the digital front doors and your front door. And there’s lots of different kinds of intents that consumers have around what they’re looking for, to and so And lastly, that takes us to search. And so we see that 80% of customers are going to search before they get to a website. They’re looking for more of a conversational UI, something that they can, you know, like if I asked a simple question, what is the elevation of Mount Everest? I’d like to get my direct answer, first of all, without clicking a bunch of blue links, then I’d like to see maybe a picture of Mount Everest, maybe I’d see other questions that people typically have asked after they get that first question and provide me different options to engage. And that’s really what we do with our search experiences. So we’re seeing, like, first citizens is a great example of that. If anybody wants to go to that. Then you’ll see search right in the middle of the homepage. And they’re doing a lot of things around search personalization, etc to. So we have the so we think of site search, we think of the authenticated customer portal search, we think of what we call workplace, which is financial professionals and the workforce is using search as they try to answer a lot of the questions that consumers have or transaction. So we kind of provide all those use cases. Okay.

Whitney McDonald 10:16
Now I know you gave one example of a bank that’s leveraging the next technology, would you mind sharing a little bit more about your network of who you serve?

Shane Closser 10:26
Yes, certainly. So we have 750, financial services clients around the globe, nine out of 10 of the largest nationals out there, all the wire houses, lots of non banks, especially in mortgage, and down to the very small financial services like credit unions that might have, you know, three to five different branches, and might be very focused on a certain city. So quite a diversity within our client base. And within the that client base, we see various different operating models. So I always like to call it the high touch, like low touch, no touch model. So you know, we would think of an online digital bank, you know, think of some of the largest ones out there that don’t have any branches and financial professionals to market to, in like wealth management is looking at like a lot of robo advisor models for really going after that mass affluent market, then we start to get to more of a higher all the way to a high touch model, which is, you know, branches with financial professionals, local and market are, they’re really building those those local relationships and understanding client’s needs and working within their communities.

Whitney McDonald 11:42
Okay, now speaking of the clients that you serve in the financial institutions you work with, wondering if you if you can give us a little bit of insight as to what they are asking for, or needing or seeing for 2023, as far as digital capabilities, what their clients are asking for what’s kind of on the horizon for those digital needs?

Shane Closser 12:04
Yeah, I think, historically, a lot of these organizations would do some research around their customers and their needs. And we’d often call that in the industry, primary research. And they would develop their personas. And, you know, they would kind of design their digital experiences around these, you know, these six to seven personas that you would typically have in market. So one might be like, you know, high earner, not rich yet, maybe somebody who’s graduated graduate from medical school, you know, or starting their career as an attorney, or in technology, to an experienced family and somebody who’s, you know, a little bit older in life and, you know, maybe has kids that are about to go to college. So what a lot of these organizations have done in the past is kind of design those experiences, as I’ve said, but I think right now is using technology to really unlock these digital experiences that and complex interactions that many consumers have. So a good example of that was if I would go to a website, and I would say, How do I save for my kids college education? Not a whole lot of websites would be able to support that well, or, Hey, what products are available for college education? Well, it’s a five to nine plan. Clients don’t know to be able to ask for that they don’t know this financial services jargon that exists. And so that’s one of the things that Yaks is really kind of helping with really kind of powering search. So they can ask questions any way they want. And they can. A lot of the marketing teams and digital teams can start to see, in this one market, we’re seeing all these questions that we’ve never been asked before. And we have no content for that. Maybe a good example of that would be like, hey, I want to find a financial professional that speaks a certain language like Mandarin or Spanish. And they might have those financial professionals in market, they just know people, we’re going to ask that question. So they get zero results. That’s something with you know, natural language processing and natural language understanding that you can now first of all, find that out that people are having all these questions, you reach out to your bankers and say, hey, who speaks this language, update that information and start to be able to actually provide those answers. So really kind of being a little bit more data driven, has been a huge topic within the industry. Thinking about how they can even use digital to help with help marketers, digital teams, and specifically, our well a lot of these bankers be able to scale. So in some markets, we’ve seen a financial advisor has maybe say 250 clients, right? So when we look at kind of high net worth, that’s that’s kind of your average. And there’s new world order. We’ve seen a lot of financial services firms say well, great We would like you to be able to manage more clients. So maybe it’s 1000, maybe it’s even 2000. The only way they’re going to be able to do that is leveraging technology to help them understand these insights about their first of all clients, like maybe some other clients have taken a position on the market and something happened in that market and out of those 2000 clients, which are the 50, that this change in the market will affect what kind of content should I send them? How do we provide that even better in our online website? So when they go to our website, and they ask this question, maybe it’s after hours they can provide, you know, they can have that self service and get that that need that. So providing a lot of clients choice has been very important. And being able to kind of help financial professionals scale and providing some of these hate touches. You know, how to tie digital touches it scales has been another important topic. Intelligence that, that these systems now have that were not possible previously to

Whitney McDonald 16:13
human been listening to the buzz, a bank automation news podcast, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. And as a reminder, you can rate this podcast on your platform of choice. Thank you for your time and be sure to visit us at Bank automation news.com For more automation news,

Whitney McDonald 0:09
Hello, and welcome to the buzz of bank automation news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald, and I’m the deputy editor of bank automation news. I’m joined by Shane Closser, head of industry of financial services at Yext, which is a digital experience software provider, he discussed how banks can enhance customer experience through search, and how this trend will impact the financial industry throughout q4 and into 2023. Solely. So, you know, what we’ve really seen with COVID is it’s accelerated everybody’s digital plans. That usually was like a three year plan, pretty much happened in three to six months,Shane Closser 0:45
we’ve seen customers behavior change. So they have different expectations, a lot of those came from these consumer expectations where they’re engaged in everyday consumerism,we think of Amazon, Amazon and Google, the kind of some of those big trends is what you were alluding to is obviously this touchless experience, you know, they now expect more choice when within their financial services, relationships, that includes being able to transact, sign up for Bill Pay, make a lot of these transactions that previously were required to go into the bank with the physical experience, there was a lot of requirements for, for instance, when I was signing up for a mortgage to sign a lot of paperwork, and you know, do a close on that, and then I’ll move to the closing. And, you know, the ability to be able to kind of select how they want to engage, whether that is you know, online baking, not talking to a financial professional or something like that, you know, Zoom format, where they can sign up video conferences and engage with, say, financial advisor, talking about what’s going on in the market, where they should put their money kind of risk appetite they have.

Whitney McDonald 1:58
Now, of course, we know that clients want this digital experience. So how can banks keep up with this trend of implementing the right digital processes that clients are expecting now?

Shane Closser 2:13
So I think, first of all, it’s the website used to be the center of the world for their digital strategy. And, you know, a lot of our clients used to kind of exclusively focus on redesigning their website, maybe there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions that have certainly happened over the last two years, you know, different capabilities that they’re now providing. So we think, even simple capabilities, like are you open right now? What are your hours of operation? Do you have, you know, a drive up ATM, you know, quick check deposits for the features that exists. And so, a lot of times these banks, were just starting out with some of the trying to keep up with some of the basic information. But it was hard enough to keep this information up to date on their website. And then we start to imagine Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon, Alexa Voice networks. So there’s literally hundreds of places that they’re trying to keep up with all this information about branches and all of the financial professionals they had. And they were really struggling with that. And COVID, kind of push them over the wall, right over your Cliff a little bit around this, because those experiences became absolutely quintessential for reaching out to the community, and there’s a lot of things that were happening. One of them was retail experiences, or this small, medium business experiences, like the PPP loans that were happening, where, you know, a lot of these digital experiences had never had that kind of scale adoption before. And we saw it in a lot of the news where there were things crashing like call center queue times were like two hours. And then a lot of times they you know, crashed and then eventually, at a certain point, and they didn’t have enough people to be able to staff call centers. And so there was a lot of problems that were exposed. And some obviously financial services organizations were really caught flat footed, flat footed around this. So when he one of the things that we’ve seen is, there’s been a lot of algorithm changes specifically with Google. So you can think about 80% of consumers are using search to go to a lot of these branch websites. And one of those algorithm updates is with the city and the other one is called to helpful update. And ultimately what you know, what their focus has been is how do they how do they bring relevant content to consumers that consumers care about? And some of the best practices that organizations can think about to make sure that their content is discoverable is reviews so reviews and reputation management? It has become a very critical topic in the industry. For instance, Wealth Management previously, because of the testimonial rule was not allowed to engage in reviews that changed November 4. So that’s just, you know, few weeks ago. And so that’s a really new precedents in the industry. There are some regulatory names that you have to adhere to. But retail banking, insurance, mortgage, all these other industries have been leveraging reviews. And we’ve seen that having those four or five star reviews can improve your search ranking by 45%. We also see that it so it’s an important trust signal for algorithms just like what we’d like to say. But we’ve also seen at the same time, those four or five star reviews, you get a 16% improvement in calls, as well as an 18% improvement in clicks to your website. So it’s important trust signal for consumers to so things to think about is how financial services organizations can really start to understand that and leverage his reputation. Management is trusting roles and authority in the market for their branches for their ATMs for their financial professionals and for their products, so that they can make sure that they’re obviously creating, reducing as much friction as possible for consumers being able to interact with them.

Whitney McDonald 6:33
Now, if we can talk a little bit about where Yext fits into this equation of allowing banks to keep up with the client expectation on the digital side, maybe explain a little bit of Yext offerings, and then what banks can do to leverage those offerings.

Shane Closser 6:48
Yeah, be glad to. So we provide what’s called the answers platform, and there’s a few things that we do. I’ll talk about them as use cases. So number one, how to, you know, financial services and banks allow all their information to be updated. So we think of when they go to Google and they search for Is there a bank near me, or what are the hours of operation, or I’d like to talk to a mortgage loan officer that speaks Spanish. So that information, you know, a lot of times it’s on their website, but they really struggled to go to those 200 Plus places to make sure all that information is updated. So that’s one thing that Yaks helps with, you can go in yaks, we have all the regulatory approvals. That information goes through workflow. So the people that need to kind of sign off on that can and then that is distributed out to all these 250 places that we mean, maintain relationships with so we have API’s in the Google, Facebook, Microsoft Bing. So that’s kind of one use case. The second use case is reviews. And it become extremely important to be able to monitor those reviews what people are saying, to be able to ask for reviews and to be able to respond to those reviews. So we’ve seen that right now, first of all, from a search engine perspective, people with four or five star reviews have a 45% improvement in search. And, you know, a lot of times, by asking for those reviews, you can increase your review rating by 1.1 star. So we provide a lot of those, like capabilities to manage that at scale. Not only about kind of branch, but also ATMs, financial professionals products and you know quite a bit other. So the third thing that we’re doing is what we call pages. And so we think of all these digital experiences that are in mobile apps that are online, to be able to kind of power that digital front door. So like we like to say the digital front doors and your front door. And there’s lots of different kinds of intents that consumers have around what they’re looking for, to and so And lastly, that takes us to search. And so we see that 80% of customers are going to search before they get to a website. They’re looking for more of a conversational UI, something that they can, you know, like if I asked a simple question, what is the elevation of Mount Everest? I’d like to get my direct answer, first of all, without clicking a bunch of blue links, then I’d like to see maybe a picture of Mount Everest, maybe I’d see other questions that people typically have asked after they get that first question and provide me different options to engage. And that’s really what we do with our search experiences. So we’re seeing, like, first citizens is a great example of that. If anybody wants to go to that. Then you’ll see search right in the middle of the homepage. And they’re doing a lot of things around search personalization, etc to. So we have the so we think of site search, we think of the authenticated customer portal search, we think of what we call workplace, which is financial professionals and the workforce is using search as they try to answer a lot of the questions that consumers have or transaction. So we kind of provide all those use cases. Okay.

Whitney McDonald 10:16
Now I know you gave one example of a bank that’s leveraging the next technology, would you mind sharing a little bit more about your network of who you serve?

Shane Closser 10:26
Yes, certainly. So we have 750, financial services clients around the globe, nine out of 10 of the largest nationals out there, all the wire houses, lots of non banks, especially in mortgage, and down to the very small financial services like credit unions that might have, you know, three to five different branches, and might be very focused on a certain city. So quite a diversity within our client base. And within the that client base, we see various different operating models. So I always like to call it the high touch, like low touch, no touch model. So you know, we would think of an online digital bank, you know, think of some of the largest ones out there that don’t have any branches and financial professionals to market to, in like wealth management is looking at like a lot of robo advisor models for really going after that mass affluent market, then we start to get to more of a higher all the way to a high touch model, which is, you know, branches with financial professionals, local and market are, they’re really building those those local relationships and understanding client’s needs and working within their communities.

Whitney McDonald 11:42
Okay, now speaking of the clients that you serve in the financial institutions you work with, wondering if you if you can give us a little bit of insight as to what they are asking for, or needing or seeing for 2023, as far as digital capabilities, what their clients are asking for what’s kind of on the horizon for those digital needs?

Shane Closser 12:04
Yeah, I think, historically, a lot of these organizations would do some research around their customers and their needs. And we’d often call that in the industry, primary research. And they would develop their personas. And, you know, they would kind of design their digital experiences around these, you know, these six to seven personas that you would typically have in market. So one might be like, you know, high earner, not rich yet, maybe somebody who’s graduated graduate from medical school, you know, or starting their career as an attorney, or in technology, to an experienced family and somebody who’s, you know, a little bit older in life and, you know, maybe has kids that are about to go to college. So what a lot of these organizations have done in the past is kind of design those experiences, as I’ve said, but I think right now is using technology to really unlock these digital experiences that and complex interactions that many consumers have. So a good example of that was if I would go to a website, and I would say, How do I save for my kids college education? Not a whole lot of websites would be able to support that well, or, Hey, what products are available for college education? Well, it’s a five to nine plan. Clients don’t know to be able to ask for that they don’t know this financial services jargon that exists. And so that’s one of the things that Yaks is really kind of helping with really kind of powering search. So they can ask questions any way they want. And they can. A lot of the marketing teams and digital teams can start to see, in this one market, we’re seeing all these questions that we’ve never been asked before. And we have no content for that. Maybe a good example of that would be like, hey, I want to find a financial professional that speaks a certain language like Mandarin or Spanish. And they might have those financial professionals in market, they just know people, we’re going to ask that question. So they get zero results. That’s something with you know, natural language processing and natural language understanding that you can now first of all, find that out that people are having all these questions, you reach out to your bankers and say, hey, who speaks this language, update that information and start to be able to actually provide those answers. So really kind of being a little bit more data driven, has been a huge topic within the industry. Thinking about how they can even use digital to help with help marketers, digital teams, and specifically, our well a lot of these bankers be able to scale. So in some markets, we’ve seen a financial advisor has maybe say 250 clients, right? So when we look at kind of high net worth, that’s that’s kind of your average. And there’s new world order. We’ve seen a lot of financial services firms say well, great We would like you to be able to manage more clients. So maybe it’s 1000, maybe it’s even 2000. The only way they’re going to be able to do that is leveraging technology to help them understand these insights about their first of all clients, like maybe some other clients have taken a position on the market and something happened in that market and out of those 2000 clients, which are the 50, that this change in the market will affect what kind of content should I send them? How do we provide that even better in our online website? So when they go to our website, and they ask this question, maybe it’s after hours they can provide, you know, they can have that self service and get that that need that. So providing a lot of clients choice has been very important. And being able to kind of help financial professionals scale and providing some of these hate touches. You know, how to tie digital touches it scales has been another important topic. Intelligence that, that these systems now have that were not possible previously to

Whitney McDonald 16:13
human been listening to the buzz, a bank automation news podcast, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. And as a reminder, you can rate this podcast on your platform of choice. Thank you for your time and be sure to visit us at Bank automation news.com For more automation news,